Register by September 1st for a 20% early registration discount. Fees are additionally discounted for graduate students.

'Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens' addresses the implications of digital labour as they are emerging in practice, politics, policy, culture, and theoretical enquiry. As workers, as authors, and as citizens, we are increasingly summoned and disciplined by new digital technologies that define the workplace and produce ever more complex regimes of surveillance and control. At the same time, new possibilities for agency and new spaces for collectivity are borne from these multiplying digital innovations. This conference aims to explore this social dialectic, with a specific focus on new forms of labour.

The changing conditions of digital capitalism often blur distinctions between workers, authors and citizens more than they clarify them. Digital workers, for example, are often authors of content for the increasingly convergent and synergistic end markets of entertainment capitalism – but authors whose rights as such have been thoroughly alienated. Citizens are often compelled to construct their identities in such a way as to produce the flexible and entrepreneurial selves demanded by the heavily consumer-oriented 'experience and attention economies' of digitalized post-Fordism.

How might we come to understand the breakdown of distinctions between labour and creativity, work and authorship, value and productive excess in the new digital economy? What is labour in an era where participation in the cultural industries is the preferred conduit to autonomy and self-valorization? What struggles do information and entertainment workers and workers in an increasingly digitalized manufacturing sector share as social understandings of labour, alienation and authorship continue to morph according to the changing fashions of heavily fetishized technologies? What might recent theorizing on the infinitely malleable 'post-Fordist image worker' tell us about the nature of affective ties to states and other political formations in the twenty-first century?

Union activists will assist academic specialists in assessing these and other crucial questions. Two panels will include representatives from the Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC), and the Canadian Media Guild (CMG). Other guild confirmation is pending. Academic participants include:

Keynote – Ursula Huws (London Metropolitan University and Analytica Social and Economic Research): "On the Cybertariat: Digital Labour, Social Relations and the Workplace"

Catherine McKercher (School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa) Mark Andrejevic (Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland) Catherine Fisk (School of Law, University of California at Irvine) David Hesmondhalgh (Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds) Brian Holmes (activist and cultural critic, Paris) Barry King (School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology) Andrea Fumagalli (Department of Political Economy and Quantitative Methods, University of Pavia) Dorothy Kidd (Department of Media Studies, University of San Francisco) Vicki Mayer (Communication Department, Tulane University, New Orleans) Helen Kennedy (Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds).